Alfresco recently announced that it will be moving their Community Edition from the MPL (Mozilla Public License) + Attribution to the GPL (v3) with an FLOSS exception that makes it easier to for other open source software with a OSI certified open source to use Alfresco as a component. Version 3 of the GPL is not quite fully ratified yet so there might be some slight changes in Alfresco licensing depending on where the GPL lands. The license change will affect the 2.0 release of Alfresco and apply to any software downloaded after February 20, 2007.
For most companies using Alfresco, the shift to the GPL will not have much impact because the Enterprise Version (which Alfresco recommends you buy if you are using the product in production) will carry a commercial license that is distinct from the GPL. I don’t know the ins and outs of how the Alfresco commercial license interacts with the licenses of the underlying open source components that Alfresco is built on (Spring (Apache License), Hibernate (LGPL), MyFaces (Apache License), etc.). However, I would stay that Alfresco has too much to lose and access to too much legal advance to do anything in violation of those open source licenses. Alfrescians, please feel free to weigh in here.
For those of you who have been keeping score, this is the third major licensing incarnation that Alfresco has gone through. Originally, they had a limited featured Community Edition and sold an Enteprise Edition that consisted of the Community Edition plus proprietary extensions. Then they open sourced the entire application but made the community edition badge-ware. This latest model is more akin to MySQL’s dual license. And MySQL seems to have built a <understatement>nice little business for itself</understatement>. My colleagues and I have been secretly hoping that Alfresco would move in this direction and I am very happy that they have because I think it makes more sense for everyone.
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Talking about why makes sense use GPL-compatible licenses few days ago I mentioned that you can take advantage of lots of programs and libraries licensed under GPL, and it looks like if Matt confirmed this their case:
“In addition, Alfresco will be able to easily integrate with other GPL projects, such as the Drupal content management software”.
Let’s now how fast Alfresco will eventually move from the Corporate production model to an hybrid one, that I wish them to be as symbiotic as possible!
Thanks for covering our move, Seth. A few points of clarification (which are required only because I didn’t do a good enough job writing our FAQ
.
When a customer buys our Enterprise code or downloads our Community code, they’re getting GPL code in either case. The header files are the same. They all say GPL.
The “Commercial LIcense” that we mention on our website is really just a waiver on the need for a user to GPL their own code. It applies to any code they get from us and derivative works thereof for the duration of their subscription to Alfresco. As you and I know, enterprises are in the business of modifying and consuming software, not distributing it. So this “protection” really doesn’t mean much to them. But many do ask for it, so we provide it.
We encourage them, however, to actively participate in the open source world, and are expecting a healthy range to do just that. I see the “dual license” approach as a temporary solution to near-term ignorance. I’m hoping that we can get past this sooner rather than later so that we can simply provide a support contract.
As for the integration with Apache-licensed code, I spent weeks (literally) working through this with our copyright counsel, Heather Meeker. The apparent (and I do mean “apparent” – I’m not convinced that there is any incompatibility) incompatibility between GPL and Apache licenses stems from differing patent provisions in them. But this is a non-issue in Alfresco, since none of the code we ship has patents on it.
Some may see this as a sign of weakness, but we view it as a mark of strength. We have code that could definitely be patented but we, like the Apache Software Foundation, have made a conscious decision to eschew patents in our own code.
So, again, because Lucene/Spring/Jakarta/etc. aren’t patented (we checked), there is no incompatibility between the two, apparent or otherwise.